I really enjoy reading Shorpy, a website that features images scanned from the American National Archive. It's an interesting, candid insight into American history and offers some great amateur photographs of scenes that wouldn't normally be featured in the history books.

Sadly, however, my knowledge of American geography is terrible, so being able to put a place to a photograph geographically by description alone wasn't easy.

So, using YQL, a little Javascript, and some HTML, I made a site that would solve this problem for me.

The site uses YQL's ability to both read RSS feeds and — using a description of each photograph — discern any places mentioned. Since Shorpy uses a fairly standard format for describing each photograph it posts, I knew I had a good chance of coming up with a decent location for each.

First I needed to retrieve the description for each item in the RSS feed. The YQL query for this is simple: "SELECT description from rss where

This example demonstrates the development process of a simple OpenSocial application that would allow the user to poke and send messages to their friends. The poke will be broadcasted into the Activity stream, and the message will be sent to the specified users friends.

Christos Faloutsos, Carnegie Mellon University, discusses patterns, generators, and tools in mining billion-node graphs. He presents a comprehensive list of static and temporal laws, and some recent observations on real graphs (like, for example, "eigenSpokes''). For generators, he describes some recent ones, which naturally match all of the known properties of real graphs. Finally, for tools, he presents "oddBall'' for discovering anomalies and patterns, as well as an overview of the PEGASUS system, which is designed for handling billion-node graphs, running on top of the "hadoop'' system.

Media Production by BAYCAT, a non-profit community media producer that educates and employs underserved youth and adults in the digital media arts.

John Sichi and Yongqiang He of Facebook discuss Facebook's recent integration of two related projects in the Hadoop ecosystem: HBase and Hive. This integration gives powerful SQL query capabilities to HBase, and brings the potential for low-latency incremental data refresh to Hive. The talk will go over performance results from initial testing of the integration. Yongqiang will discuss RCFile, which is a columnar storage for Hive. It is already deployed within Facebook, which is in the process of converting old partitions to RCFile. Depending on the data layout, it has resulted in ~20% space savings.

Media Production by BAYCAT, a non-profit community media producer that educates and employs underserved youth and adults in the digital media arts.

We are pleased to announce the availability of YQL tables for Y! Mail.

If you (the developer) wanted to use the Yahoo! Mail API before today, you first would have to know the APIs, form the request (JSON/SOAP), and cook it up before sending the request to the server. But that game has just changed.

YQL tables for Y! Mail allow developers to access Y! Mail data using YQL queries. Using the YQL Mail tables, all you need to do is execute one query, for example:

select * from ymail.messages

This query will get the list of messages from your Inbox (by default). Similarly, to get folders all we need to do is

select * from ymail.folders

Now, these are simple queries. Imagine you also get the power of mail search with this. For example,

select * from ymail.messages where attachmenttype='jpeg'

or

select * from ymail.messages where query='yahoo'

These queries help you narrow down your search to more granular content.

Rod Smith, IBM Fellow and Vice President of the IBM Emerging Internet Technologies organization, talks about how Hadoop is emerging as a disruptive technology that can power new classes of big data applications while integrating with existing middleware infrastructures — applications like monitoring massive datasets, computationally intensive jobs for evidence-based medicine, analysis for fraud detection, and more. Hadoop makes these next-generation solutions feasible, many of which will provide a disruptive advantage for those that implement them. In this presentation you'll hear how IBM is using Hadoop as a platform for applications and see a demonstration of how you can harness the power of this disruptive technology to help leverage the value of big data and big data analytics.